Merlewood House in the High Street and a hint of how the other half lived in the spring of 1851

Merlewood House in 1909

We are looking at Merlewood House which was one of those fine old houses Eltham did so well.

It stood just east of the present National Westminster Bank and was demolished when the road was widened and the bungalow shops were built.

It serves to remind us of the contrasts that Eltham threw up, for with Sherard House to its left it is the home of one of the well off in Eltham but stood close to Jubilee Cottages which had been built in 1833 and the interestingly named Ram Alley which in the 1850s and 60s housed some of our farm workers, labourers and tradesmen.

Merlewood had been home to Mr Richard Lewin from 1798 till 1853 and was ocuupied by a succesion of people who styled themselves "Gentry" including Caleb Mann Esq and Mr Howard Keeling who "left a benfaction to the National Schools."*

By contrast in Ram Alley lived Samuel and Mary Lambert and their three children.  He described himself as a labourer in 1851 and was one of the 21 men in Ram Alley who laboured on the land or the roads, and consitiuted 54% of those earning a living there.

Which is a nice introduction to a series of stories exploring the two sides of Eltham society.

Next; living in Ram Alley and Eagle House.


Pictures; Merelwood House , from The story of Royal Eltham, R.R.C. Gregory, 1909 and published on The story of Royal Eltham, by Roy Ayers, http://www.gregory.elthamhistory.org.uk/bookpages/i001.htm

*The story of Royal Eltham, R.R.C. Gregory, 1909,page 278

Lost on the streets of my city

Now one of the advantages of a misspent youth is that I am fairly familiar with the streets of Manchester.

From 1969 for three years as a student at the College of Knowledge on Aytoun Street I wandered the city between lectures.

Back then the library was for the studious and so after Mr Wilson’s lecture on contemporary Soviet Government and before Mr Ripley on the Chartists or Trevor Thomas on Andrew Marvel I was off exploring my adopted home.

It took me to the Art Gallery and the Ref along with the Town Hall, the warren of streets that is now the Northern Quarter and down to the very unfashionable Castlefeld.

That said the knowledge is a bit frozen in time and I didn’t really get back to looking for the historic the interesting and the bizarre until the start of the last decade.

But despite that knowledge, the maps, and the street directories this image has defeated me.

The picture come to light through a project which Neil Simpson tells me is “the Town Hall Photographer's Collection Digitisation Project, which currently is Volunteer led and Volunteer staffed is in the process of taking the 200,000 negatives in the collection dating from 1956 to 2007 and digitising them.

The plan is to gradually make the scanned images available online - initially on the Manchester Local Images Collection Website".

I think we are on West Mosley Street which was sandwiched between Cooper Street and Mosley Street and vanished sometime before now.

I am fairly confident that there will be lots of theories and if we are lucky the answer.

In the meantime I will ask my friend Andy to look up his 1969 street directory and try to identify the firm on the board above that white building.

We shall see.

Location Manchester

Picture; of Manchester, 1968, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass 

Views from a Chorlton window …… sixty years ago

Yesterday I was looking out on Barlow Moor Road in the summer of 1960 in the company of Ann Love.

Now given that Ann lives in France, and I was in London in that summer of 1960, in the strictest sense we couldn’t be together, but she has shared with me some of the pictures she made.

Having sketched the interior of her home along with the roads around Chorlton, she took to capturing the view from a back bedroom window, across the garden  of her home at 523 Barlow Moor Road.

The images are now with the passage of sixty years quite unique given that what was her garden is now a car park. 

Location; Chorlton

Pictures; 523 Barlow Moor Road, 1960, from the collection of Ann Love

Strikes ….memories ….. and Miss Dannimac ….. more from the Manchester Jewish Museum

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single visit to a museum is never enough and must be followed by a second, third and fourth.

Window, 2026

Now, this is particularly true of the Manchester Jewish Museum which celebrates and records the history and culture of the Jewish community here and abroad.*

The Museum, 2025

I first discovered the museum soon after it opened in 1984 and followed that first visit with becoming a “Friend”, and have written extensively about it.**

But as so often happens other things get in the way, and I hadn’t been back for a very long time.

So, with a morning free I took the tram to Victoria and wandered up Cheetham Hill Road and was not disappointed.

I guess I was there for a couple of hours, learned a lot from the displays and enjoyed a series of conversations with some of the guides.

Of all the fascinating exhibits the one that drew me back was a page from The Waterproofer which was the official newspaper of the Waterproof Garment Worker’s Trade Union for July 1935 which recorded the end of 1934-5 strike.

The strike which was a response to the lowering piecework rates lasted nine months with the newspaper recording that the union would “not rest until every unscrupulous employer is dealt with and sweating abolished in the trade”. 

The Waterproofer, 1935

It is a story I was not over familiar with but it’s one I intend to follow up, and in that I may be helped by the memory maps of Jewish Manchester which are “a new digital resource where you can explore former sites of Jewish memory in the Cheetham Hill, Strangeways and Hightown areas of Manchester. Here you will find audio interviews, photographs, and information about more than 40 sites (we hope to include more in future) that consistently appear in people's recollections of these areas”.***

And then there is Miss Dannimac the “canvas Rain Coat … You’ve got to like Fashion to wear it”.  

Miss Dannimac. 2026

It was created by Ralph Levy who had “a vision of making rainwear not just practical but fashionable [and] new manufacturing techniques allowed Ralph to produce coats in lighter fabrics which were featured in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and modelled by fashion icons including Twiggy”.

And that I think is all for now, because while there is a great deal more in the museum, I think that should be for a visit.

Pictures; Thursday at the museum, 2026 & 2025 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Manchester Jewish Museum, https://www.manchesterjewishmuseum.com/

**Manchester Jewish Museum, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Manchester%20Jewish%20Museum

***Waterproof Garment Workers Trade Union, A Memory Map of Jewish Manchester, https://jewishmanchestermemorymap.org/?feature_type=point&id=320

523 Barlow Moor Road, captured in a moment in time in 1960

Now I am back at 523 Barlow Moor Road where my friend Ann Love lived during the 1950s and 60s.

It is still there today but has undergone conversion into flats.

Over the last few months Ann has been sharing her memories of growing up in the house providing a vivid account of everything from the kitchen range to her bedroom along with some wonderful sketches of both the inside and exterior of the house.

And now along with more stories her husband has produced a series of detailed models of the property which perfectly create a large Chorlton house in 1960.

"The basement, or cellar as we used to call it, was reached by a door and steps from the kitchen.

It was always cool, and an ideal place for storage.

Half way down the steps was a wide shelf, where cold meats were kept, on a large platter, then continuing down, there were five rooms.

Firstly there was the coal cellar, this could also be reached by a door on the side of the house next to the workshop.

Once or twice a year the coal cart would arrive, with sacks of coal, the cart would stop in the drive, and the coal man would lift the sacks of coal from the cart and empty them down through the doorway into the cellar.

 We would have to count the sacks s they were emptied, because once the coal was in the cellar, it was just a big heap. The coal men were covered in soot from carrying sacks of coal all day.

All through the winter coal would have to be carried up from the cellar in buckets to keep the range in the kitchen alight.

Under the Dining room was a storage area for food – there was a meat safe, with wire mesh to keep out the flies, and jars and big earthenware bowls with preserves, and preserved eggs in isinglass.

The small room under the hall was full of shelves of tinned goods, corned beef and salmon, and pickles.

Under the lounge were coffins, standing on end, which Dad had made during quiet periods, in case of flu epidemics, and bad weather in winter. 

They were in a variety of different sizes, and good places to play when my cousins came over to play hide and seek!

Under the kitchen was where the planks of wood were stored, before being carried down the garden to be made into coffins. When the house was on fire, this could have been a real problem if it had caught fire."

© Ann Love

Models; Howard Love 2014

Walking out on Oxford Street ............ 1966

I won’t be alone in remembering these buildings.

We are at the top of Oxford Street where it joins St Peter’s Square, and of the four buildings captured by the photographer on a drab day in 1966, all have gone.

Some went a long time ago, others more recently.

So, while the grimy looking one, home to Boots and which faced across the Cenotaph to Central Ref, was still there in 1969.

I remember gazing across it from the steps of the library but can’t quite remember when it was demolished for Elisabeth House which in turn was torn down for One St Peter’s Square.

More recently its neigbour, on the corner of Mosley Street and the square which many admired has been lost for that stark, and very bright building which is Two St Peter’s Square.

On the opposite side of Mosley Street, the properties on the left of the picture went became the peace Gardens and are now part of the space which includes platforms for the Metro and the reallocated cenotaph.

All of which just leaves me with the picture itself with its ghostly like figures caught in mid stride, and that sign for the restaurant “The Egg and I” which I never visited but which will be remembered by some.
Location; Oxford Street, Manchester

Picture; Oxford Street, 1966, Courtesy of Manchester Archives+ Town Hall Photographers' Collection,  https://www.flickr.com/photos/manchesterarchiveplus/albums/72157684413651581?fbclid=IwAR35NR9v6lzJfkiSsHgHdQyL2CCuQUHuCuVr8xnd403q534MNgY5g1nAZfY

St Barnabus and its journey from Woolwich

Now I have passed St Barnabus Church countless times and never knew it was originally sited in Woolwich.

It was one of those Eltham churches I have already written about but couldn’t resist doing so again when I came across this picture.

It appears in a new book on Woolwich and the history of the building is always worth repeating.

“Designed by Sir George Scott, the Naval Dockyard church was built between 1857 and 1859 in Woolwich Dockyard becoming redundant after the latter’s closure in 1869.  

In 1932-33, the distinctive red brick edifice was reconstructed in Eltham.”*

When I first posted the story it led to a flood of memories from people who remembered it on fire after it had been hit during a bombing raid in  the last war.

Picture; St Barnabus Church,1858,courtesy of Kristina Bedford

*Woolwich Through Time, Kristina Bedford, 2014, Amberley Publishing,